Four months after Ken Burns’s massive ten-part documentary Jazz first aired on public television, the air still hasn’t cleared. Jazz fans and jazz factions thrive on argument — always have — and Burns has provoked a real cutting session. Admirers say the nineteen-hour film is the most exciting, exacting and…
Someone must be tinkering with the human genome up in permafrost country. A professional wrestler with the brain of a hummingbird continues to serve as governor of Minnesota. The other day, a wheat farmer in neighboring North Dakota stood up on a chair in his local post office and announced…
The crimes Hollywood has committed against the major Russian novelists would themselves fill a pretty hefty tome. While reducing giants like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak to lavish costuming and snappy dialogue over the years, the studio moguls also made some eccentric casting choices — for instance, cover boy George Hamilton…
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that the most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that…
The furies of the National Hockey League — 130-mile-an-hour slapshots, player salaries that would numb Bill Gates’s checkbook, blood-streaked goons exchanging insults in French and Russian — have once more drawn all of Denver under their spell. Since the Avs swept Vancouver, Cup craziness has spilled out of the sports…
New Orleans’s seedy Bourbon Street is infested day and night with barfing frat boys, bug-eyed tourists from Keokuk and nimble-fingered pickpockets. Ironically, it is also home to some of the most disgraceful music ever to sully the name of traditional jazz. Right there in the birthplace of the art –…
At seventeen, she was a wide-eyed high school girl with a silken voice, shyly sitting in at smoky Denver clubs with local mentors like Joe Keel, Dee Minor and Nat Yarbrough. Twenty-five years later, she is a Grammy winner who’s played the White House twice, has eleven albums in the…
In this era of obscene player salaries and disposable loyalties, assembling a baseball team is an agony of constant reinvention, incessant tinkering and, when the occasion calls for it, vain hope. Unless, of course, you’re the New York Yankees, who have no need for the usual wishful thinking, so inflated…
In David Maquiling’s quirky little first feature, Too Much Sleep, a rudderless 24-year-old who lives at home with his mother and works nights as a security guard must go on a quest. Rising lazily from his bed, he ventures into the tidy suburbs of New Jersey to track down a…
The current explosion in neo-Latin jazz has been set off largely by restless, brilliant pianists — the Cuban virtuoso Chucho Valdés and the Panamanian wizard Danilo Perez, to name just two. Their music is highly evolved and relentlessly multicultural — a spicy gumbo of Latin American, African and hard-bopping U.S…
The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me You Them (Eu, Tu, Eles) is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit her life. Without knowing it, they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with…
The best thing that ever happened to the PGA Tour, the sages of the fairway say, is Tiger Woods’s completely dominant performance in 2000 — nine PGA wins (including three majors), more than $9 million in earnings, and the lowest scoring average (68.17 per round) in history. Even wheat farmers…
Twice a year, like clockwork, Red Holloway surfaces at El Chapultepec, the beloved wreck of a jazz club at 20th and Market streets. Denver musicians — especially saxophonists — always drop by for another dose of Holloway’s powerful, blues-inflected playing, a spread-wing style that reflects his past collaborations with everyone…
The stereotypical stock-car-racing fan is a 320-pound feed-store clerk from Gritsville, Alabama. Got the Stars and Bars flying from the double-wide. Wife also may be his first cousin, but that don’t mean he’s gonna share that plug of Red Man with her. Leastways, not ’til she changes out the U-joints…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
One night last week, the Denver Nuggets and the New York Knicks played a professional basketball game in the Pepsi Center. At least that’s what the morning papers said. Beheld from our vantage point, in lofty section 369, the event might actually have been one of many things: a concert…
Given the horrors of war and scourges of bloody stupidity that have plagued the world in the past three decades, the murder by Palestinian terrorists of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich now seems like a minor episode in the history of our collective folly –…
The modern jazz giant Charles Mingus earned scant mention in Ken Burns’s lengthy but misshapen PBS documentary about the music, so newcomers in thrall to Burns’s view may not grasp Mingus’s enormous reach and influence. For thirty years he was a powerful bassist, a daring, big-scale composer and a philosopher…
Given the exalted circumstances of today’s professional athletes and the inadequate appreciation most of them show for their good fortune, it’s always nice to find the rare individual who does the job without complaint, keeps his mouth shut and demands no special treatment…save for the occasional raw carrot. No thoroughbred…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
The first thing — and possibly the last — you need to know about the new Extreme Football League is that Dick Butkus is the philosopher king of the rules committee. For those who don’t remember Butkus (which is to say, virtually every fan the XFL hopes to attract), this…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
